Yahoo! Announces Reimagined flickr

flickr has been allowing users to upload and share their photos since 2004. That was the year that Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake decided to help blaze the trail for what would become one of the most recognizable properties of the early Web 2.o. That may not sound like a long time, but in internet years, it’s a lifetime. In March 2005 Yahoo! purchased flickr for $35 Million and proceeded to let it wither on the vine. For 8 years flickr has remained relatively unchanged while the visual web caught and passed the now geriatric photo sharing site. But flickr used to be awesome…I mean really awesome. flickr was the place where you could share and tag your photos long before Facebook came along. flickr pioneered the concept of user generated content and allowed many an amateur snapshot artist to make a name for themselves. flickr is like that old friend from high school that you thought was really cool, but somehow lost touch with. The fondly remembered website suffered through years of neglect from one Yahoo! CEO after another. From Jerry Yang to Carol Bartz to strange tale of Scott Thompson, each one did little to stem the fall of a once proud web property. Last year, Yahoo! hired former Google executive Marissa Mayer to helm the ship and almost immediately, throngs of loyal flickr users petitioned her, pleading for one simple thing: “Make flickr Awesome Again.”

Monday evening Mayer made a lot of those people happy when she announced a new, redesigned flickr. The updated look finally takes advantage of it’s beautiful visual content to bring photos front and center. Prior to this update, users were limited to only 250 photos unless they wanted to pay for a pro account. This pricing structure was a relic from the days of expensive storage solutions. flickr now offers three types of accounts; Free, Ad Free, and Doublr. The free option includes 1 Terabyte of storage limited to 200MB per photo and 1GB per video. The Ad Free option removes all site advertising for an annual fee of $49.99. As the name suggestes the Doublr account includes two Terabytes of storage and is aimed at the professional photographer with a price of $499.99 per. These updates along with recently redesigned iOS and Android applications have finally brought our old friend back.